Self-awareness may be a good thing
It’s been a while since I last posted and, if I’m being totally honest, part of the reason for my lack of activity is that I’ve fallen victim to a feeling that I’ve been rendered redundant by events.
When joining the Rust staff and seeking to ‘find my own voice’ in order to make a worthwhile contribution, I alighted upon the angle that – British politics being a fundamentally mucky, hypocritical game which no self-respecting individual with an IQ over 95 and an ounce of integrity would ever consider as a pastime, still less a way of life – from time to time I would bring the searchlight of Jonathan Aitken’s famous (but subsequently in his case somewhat discredited) ‘sword of truth’ to bear upon the doings of our Establishment masters by offering absurdist comments upon political and current affairs.
Over the last two years in particular, it may not surprise readers of this august organ that it seems I am not alone in reaching the unwelcome conclusion that, as regards global politics generally – never mind just the British variety – “You just couldn’t make it up”.
Ironically, it was only last Sunday night that I was forcibly reminded of this by the saddo expedient of flicking through the offerings on my cable television box in the folorn hope of finding something light and entertaining to watch on before going to bed and came to a repeat of Have I Got News For You being transmitted on the comedy channel Dave.
Said programme featured David Mitchell as the guest host, someone anonymous as Ian Hislop’s team mate and Andy Hamilton as Paul Merton’s.
When I first came to it I felt the item must have been about a decade old, but when the ‘current affairs’ being used as a springboard to the supposedly satirical quips and comments were all about the 2016 American presidential election – and Republican candidate Donald Trump in particular – I was swiftly and involuntarily forced to reacquaint myself with the fact of life that, whenever things are happening thick and fast, time necessarily seems to fly by.
[Except when you’re actually old and retired, of course, when time seems to be whizzing by on a daily basis, whatever you’re doing – even if it’s nothing.]
As these things go, the HIGNFY episode I’m referring to was quite fun and diverting. The chief mine from which, with hardly any effort at all, Mitchell and the others were digging ridiculous gems from their collective comedic viewpoint was inevitably the collected sayings (especially those expressed ‘on the hoof’ on the campaign trail) of the now US President.
It would have been difficult for any viewer (and impossible for this one) not to have laughed out loud and/or shake their head in disbelief at some of the ‘condemned out of his own mouth’ utterings of Mr Trump presented to the panel for comment or reaction. Some of the latter were inevitably quite near the knuckle in terms of potential slander.
However.
My point here is that the comfortable and condescending stance of everyone involved in the programme, including the audience in the studio and indeed anyone watching the transmission on UK television, was that firstly, by definition, British society and politics superior in every possible respect to that of the United States; and secondly, that Donald Trump – whether at the time of making the programme he was simply one of a raft of potential would-be candidates for the Republication presidential nomination, or even (having been chosen for that honourable post) now out on the stump in the Presidential electoral campaign proper – was a boorish, uneducated, stupid and laughably-unsuitable lunatic whom – we all naturally assumed – would never in a million years possibly ever get elected as President of even a head-case of a Western democracy such as the US of A.
Well, to adapt a saying beloved of the late comedian Bob Monkhouse, “We’re not laughing now”.
And none of us is exactly heaving Ted-Heath-style with mirth at the goings on in British politics in recent times either – I’m not going to list them all here [you can do that yourselves more quickly than I could] because all I’d be doing is ‘filling space’.
The thing is, when the whole world seems to be going straight to hell in a hand-cart, not many of us feel like laughing, still less have the inclination to invent jokes about it. You’d like to do both – and you’d probably try to – if it wasn’t all so serious.
I’m even getting concerned now about Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP these days.
The whole reason I counselled Rust readers long and hard to vote for Brexit was the expectation that this would cause La Sturgeon to organise a second Scottish independence referendum and thus enable the rest of the UK to ditch the distinctly humourless tartan cancer adversely affecting the smooth running of our beloved nation.
Now she’s suddenly gone very quiet, possibly because someone has awoken her and forced her to smell the coffee.
Damn that man (or woman)!
